and the vice president and majority of the cabinet declaring in writing to have the vice president become acting president. host: go ahead with your question. caller: do you think if it president and vice president did not get along, they could use the 25th amendment? guest: sounds like a threat. i don't see that happening, because as you yourself stated, a lot of the movement that the vice president would have to make to assume the presidency would call for an agreement among the cabinet officers. you are talking here about real conspiracies having to develop. it would just be highly unlikely. anything is possible, but as you yourself reading the

stipulations of the 28th amendment, it is rather finely crafted to prevent the kind of a gray. we wou -- gray area we were dealing with previously. i would say that it is highly unlikely. nothing impossible. it would be a good thing for a thriller novel, but highly unlikely. host: the national portrait gallery, if folks are interested in seeing, what will it be on display? guest: it will be at the gallery, has been almost a year, and closes sometime in january but i wish i had the exact date. we have a lot of great images and objects, and there are interviews with four of the five living vice-president, and you

will find those interesting, telling us what it is to be vice president. host: mr. hart, thank you. guest: thank you. host: on our program tomorrow, we will talk to patrick michaels of the cato institute on climate change could hera. harold holzer will talk about labor groups during the last few decades. and we will also talk about the growth of islamic radicalism within the united states. all those topics and your calls, starting tomorrow at 7:00. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2009] .

>> here is what is ahead. next, a look at the history of the atomic bomb. then a panel discussion on global security after the fall of the berlin wall. later, a review of the 2008 elections. saturday, a look back at the cuban missile crisis with former kennedy advisers ted sorensen and karaoke secret have war threats been over hyped in the post cold-war world?

a university of virginia panel on how the political process has been affected by the internet. and facebook founder chris hughes on how social networking is changing the political process. this holiday weekend on c-span. >> on this vote, the yeahs are 60, the nays are 39. the motion is agreed to. >> with that vote, the senate moves the health care bill to the floor. starting monday and through december, follow the entire debate, and how the bill would affect access to medical care, the public option, taxes, abortion, and medicare. live on c-span2, the only network that brings you the senate gavel-to-gavel. >> the c-span 2010 studentcam contest is here. create a five to eight-minute

video on one of our country's greatest strengths, or a challenge. it must show varying points of view. the deadline is january 20. winning entries will be shown on c-span. go to studentcam.org fort campbell -- for rules and info. >> the nation's 13 presidential libraries hosted a conference last month at the kennedy library on presidents in the nuclear age. the first panel features scholars discussing the race to build the bomb. it is about one hour and 15 minutes. >> good morning, everyone. thank you for coming out on this wonderful, beautiful day in boston, on columbus day parade i am sharon foster, the assistant archivist for the presidential libraries. i welcome you to this third

presidential library conference. "the presidency in the nuclear age." today's gathering follows the 2007 conference on the presidency and the supreme court held that the fdr library, and our 2006 conference on the presidency and vietnam. many of you in the audience may have been at that conference. these symposia are one way in which the presidential libraries collaborate, share resources, and educate the public. we also work together on a variety of initiatives, including traveling exhibits, interactive web sites like the presidential timeline, institute for teachers and national issues forums that allow the public to convene and discuss the pressing policy issues and challenges of our time. outside in the hallway is an example of our joint collaborations', an exhibit the kennedy library curator with photos and documents of the

presidential library. this display, highlighting key moments in presidential history related to nuclear arms, demonstrates the power of our unique holding to teach new generations about our national history. the exhibit features a photo of winston churchill meeting with franklin roosevelt. as you may know, president roosevelt conceived and was the first to build a presidential library and donate and give it to the national archives. in dedicating his library located next to his boyhood home in hyde park, new york, fdr stated that to maintain archival facilities, a nation must believe in three things -- it must believe in the past, it must believe in the future, but above all, it must believe in the capacity of its own people to learn from the past so as to gain judgment in creating their own future. at about the same time franklin

roosevelt had another building built. on the eastern end of his family estate. he called it a top college. it was his own private retreat where -- top cottage. it was his own truck private retreat. it was on the hudson river that many believe he first discussed with winston churchill the effort to build an atomic bomb. today we gather at the library here, strengthened by the belief that in examining our past we can better safeguard our planet and our future. we will analyze how the news and american presidents shared in 1942 with his british counterpart would reshape history and the american presidency. we will discuss president truman's decision to use the bonds and world war ii. the famed 13 days in october in which a cataclysmic nuclear exchange was barely avoided. and efforts since that time to

limit the use of proliferation of nuclear weapons. we will hear directly from two former presidents, a secretary of state and winner of the nobel peace prize, presidential advisers, diplomats, pulitzer prize-winning historian, journalist, and from you, the audience, by way of your written questions. i want to thank all of the presidential libraries and all -- and those of their foundations who have lent their support to this conference, and to c-span for broadcasting the proceedings nationally. i think all of you for coming, and i would like for the representatives from the libraries and the foundations and the kennedy library staff to stand up and recognized. [applause] it now gives me great pleasure to introduce the 41st president

of the united states. where is the video? here it comes. to formally open our proceedings. we invited him to consider parachuting down in celebration to launch this event, but it seems he only goes skydiving on his birthday. but he did agree to send this video, which was taped last week at a seaside retreat in maine. ladies and gentleman, reporting -- the former -- the 41st president of united states, george herbert walker bush. >> good morning and welcome. it is my great pleasure to help open the third national conference sponsored by the national archives and by our nation's 13 presidential libraries, from herbert hoover to george w. bush. it could not be more appropriate as of this conference is being held in boston and hosted at the john f. kennedy presidential library. president kennedy understood the power of history to an leighton

our national leaders as they faced the unique -- to enlighten our national leaders. as they faced the unique challenges of our time. now his deep interest in history as carry forth by his daughter, the wonderful caroline kennedy, and i am so pleased to accept her invitation to share a few words to open this historic conference. i understand this event is helping to mark the kennedy library 30th anniversary, and i salute that remarkable institution as well as the other 12 presidential libraries for the important work they all do. i should note that the current director of the kennedy library, tom putnam, grew up in kennebunk maine, and worked with me on my 1980 campaign. i am pleased that that has led

him to take on a leadership role in the presidential library system. the chosen topic could not be more timely. as the world faces the prospect of more countries gaining access to nuclear materials, it is fitting for the presidential libraries to gather historians, scholars, and foreign-policy practitioners together to discuss the presidency in the nuclear age. i look forward to hearing more about your deliberations. [applause] >> good morning. i'm tom putnam, the director of

the kennedy library at least, i hope i am still the director of the kennedy library as president bush just revealed my republican flirtations as a senior in high school. perhaps that proves that presidential libraries are truly non-partisan organizations, maybe that just the vetting process is not as stringent as what goes on in washington these days. i want to make a few brief announcements. i want to thank our conference producer, amy mcdonald, and our director of education, nancy mccloy, for putting all of today's events together. we will take written questions from the audience. there will be people on the size to collect the questions and there are more index cards if you need them. i will be using film clips throughout the day that have been given to us by the various presidential libraries. they are of varying quality, based on the time that many of those videos were taken. we will do our best to keep on schedule.

please note that we will open each of the next sessions with video clips, so if for some reason you prefer not to watch the video clips, we ask that you not be out in the main hallway because sometimes that can be distracting for those who wish to view them. in an effort to save time, we will not have formal introductions of all of our panelists, but that is why we put together that beautiful program booklet that has details, biographical information, and the moderator's or i will let you know who each person on the stage is so you can connect the face with the name. when program update -- abc chief foreign affairs correspondent martha had to travel to yemen this weekend. her husband of npr news is here in her stead. caroline kennedy will join us later today and offer opening remarks for our afternoon session, but i also wanted to note we are pleased to have clifton truman daniel, the grandson of president truman, here with us today.

if you could stand, we would like to welcome you. [applause] the exhibit that sharon mentioned in the foyer, one of the most arresting documents is a bid document from -- is a entry from harry truman's diary, nine days after the first test. the present rights, "we have discovered the most terrible bomb and the history of the world. it may be the fire prophesied in the euphrates after noah and his fabulous ark. it may be a good thing that hitler and stalin did not discover this atom bomb. it is the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made most useful." please join me in welcoming our first panel, reverend wilson, ms. campbell, richard rhodes,

thank you. >> we are going to begin by discussing whether or not roosevelt really had any choice whether or not to develop the bomb. it goes back to a terrible coincidence, and that coincidence was the discovery of fission in germany in 1938 at the same time as the heightening of nazi aggression in europe. the question i really think for you gentlemen to start with is once those events took place, was there ever going to be any turning back from the scientists point of view. richard, why don't you start us off? >> it is interesting to look at the front page of "the new york times" during this period of time. there were many stories about the discovery of fission, about its potential for driving steam ships across the ocean, but also its potential for war. it was not a secret. the science was not a secret. the original papers of the discovery of fission, and then

one about the theoretical development behind it had appeared in international science journals since night -- since late 1938 and 1939. this was not a secret. it was something that everyone who understood a little bit about this science realized was a momentous change in our ability to release energy from the nucleus of the atom. therefore, for me, and anyone who looks at disinformation, the notice that there was -- a common for trail, particularly robert oppenheimer in his early work, moving toward los alamos, the the realm of the bomb, the notion that there was some sort of bargain is fundamentally wrong. the question from the beginning was, who was going to follow through and develop such a weapon, and the great concern on the part of particularly the

physicists who ended up being the ones who did the primary work on the american bomb was, would not see germany get there first? the discovery had been made in germany. many of the leading physicists in germany were deeply involved in the development of nuclear physics. they seemed to have a head start over the rest of the world. there was a profound sense of fear, a race toward developing the atomic bomb, which intel the program for at least the first years. >> as the reports from those emigrating scientists came in -- and many of them fled to this country but had a network at home cut -- and their report to this country that there were rumors, research going on in germany, and that germany was ahead of us in the development of a very powerful new kind of weapon. as these reports came through, and we had civilian scientists,

leaders of institutions like bush of the carnegie institution, james conant of harvard -- as these men heard the reports, they grew alarmed and of course we have very quickly, to move their history, we have a very famous and very and scientist who drafted his friend, albert einstein, to write a letter finally to president roosevelt, warning of the danger that the germans might develop such a weapon first. bill, tell us, what were the immediate ramifications in terms of, for roosevelt, trying to decide what to do? >> interestingly, roosevelt is not the most receptive to the original einstein letter. he realizes immediately all the details in the way that what you just mentioned, jenny, the implications. he moves relatively slowly.

the british are quite aware of the german scientists, the potential for the bomb, and there committee report galvanizes, i think, one that is reported in detail, to the american scientists. it is then that fdr realizes, and of course the united states has moved closer and closer, the danger of hillard getting greater and greater. it is then that he -- and of hitler getting greater and greater. it is then that the manhattan product is put under way. the scientists initially think they may be able to handle this venture, but they realized early on they are going to need all the weight and immense force of the american military in a wartime situation to gather the infrastructure needed for the science that richard of course has written about so well. it is from that point on that fdr is behind the venture,

enormous amounts of money committed to the venture, so it takes a little time to get behind what we now know as the manhattan project. but eventually he does. when you think about the original einstein letter -- poor einstein, he had all sorts of difficulty gaining access to fdr. >> and he was an old man of science by that time, not on the cutting edge. it is interesting to note that part of the problem was not that a weapon could be built but whether it could be built in time to use in this war. there was great concern on the part of the scientists and certainly the wartime leaders that any resources and manpower would be used, siphoned off to develop a project that would yield a weapon that would not be useful in time for the war. so this was the initial concern, and probably the initial reason for a lot of the sluggishness. once it became apparent that such a weapon was going to be feasible with a herculean

effort, but feasible, then it got started in earnest. >> the key was from a letter from a physicist and a report from the british government that describe what sort of machinery you would have to build, what kind of chemical and physical work you had to do. it became physical and practical. i would like to use a simple image that came from one of the french scientists who worked in america. he said from a laboratory bench in 1938, the discovery of fishing, to the end of the war in 1945, -- the discovery of fission, to the end of the war in 1945, that was a huge project, a process they had to go through. >> on the point that you both made of it becoming a military project and then wrapping up in terms of billions of dollars, billions of dollars in manpower,

resources, money. was there any doubt from the point that it was conceived that they were building a weapon and a weapon that would be used? >> i do not think so. i think it was clear from the beginning. again, i want to emphasize, how much particular the scientists felt it was a race against nazi germany. someone said the notion of a third reich defended and power by atomic power for 1000 years was terrifying to everyone. >> james b. conant said to harvard students, "the worst possibility we face is not war, it is the complete victory of totalitarianism." i think it sums up the feeling of the scientists at that point that the risk to western civilization -- democracy, freedom, and everything we held dear -- was far greater than what they felt at that point was the risk of developing and using such a weapon. >> i think some of the volunteers involved -- some of

the politicians involved, the more effort expended on the moment -- on the manhattan project it added to the momentum. the project developed a momentum that it became almost inconceivable that they would not use the product of some much scientific energy, but also so much expenditure of money. that influences burns when we get to the truman administration. they looked at this as an enormous public investment, and i think they never concede that it would be used. >> the excuse that, we are half done, we need the rest of it. it was true for the manhattan project, 2. >> you make a good point in your book, richard, that even as early as 1943, all during 1944, there were constant conversations about the post war effect, constant concerns among

the scientists. they saw right away that this was going to be a revolutionary capacity, a completely different class of weapons that would have an enormous effect on international relations. right away those conversations started to take place. interestingly enough, while there was enormous attention paid to this concern, very little conversation about the bomb would be used. >> i guess, you know, looking over what the scientists were talking about, first of all, they needed a reason beyond making a weapon of mass destruction. when oppenheimer went around to the universities to recruit people for los alamos and elsewhere, he could not tell them what they were doing. what he told untypically was this -- what he told them typically was this thing that we're working on may end this war and it may end all wars. so even at the beginning of his recruiting for los alamos where

they boat -- where they build the visible bombs, there was a sense that this had large implications for the future of the world. >> so, take us to roosevelt's situation. we had the trinity test. it works. we have bombs in development. we now have to decide how to use the bombs, where to use the bomb. various military and scientific committees are drawn up, and the advising committees are recommending use of the first bomb on an industrial city -- that would be a war plants -- with a large population of workers cluster around it for maximum effect. the notion was that, just as in europe, air power alone could not end the fighting, that in japan they had demonstrated they were very fierce fighters, that they would fight to the death. we knew this from the horrendous death toll in iwo jima and okinawa. that we could carpet bomb the cities before we send in troops,

but there would be a horrendous loss of life, both japanese and allied soldiers. so the concept was you use the bomb without prior warning to shock the japanese into surrender. >> let's be clear. the decision to bomb cities to kill civilians had been made three years earlier in europe, and by the time, by the summer of 1945, it had also begun in japan. at the beginning of august, 1945, every japanese city of more than 50,000 population had been firebombed and basically burned out with the loss of at least 1 million japanese civilian lives. the question of the decision to drop the bomb, which has become, in school programs all over america, a fundamentally moral question, was already resolved, if you will, within our

government and our military by then. it was not believed that these weapons in were different in order of magnitude or destruction from firebombing, and in fact they were not. >> the conventional bombing of tokyo in one night, using really old-fashioned jellied gasoline incendiary bombs, killed 100,000 in one night. so it was not seen by the scientists really as a moral issue. >> and to make sure that the bomb was as conventional as possible, because there was concern about the radiation being the equivalent of poison gas, which of course we had forsworn during the war. the bomb was deliberately set to go off 1,800 yards above ground zero so that there would be no turning up of soil and irradiate of soil and production of a lot of radioactive materials. the scientists at los alamos,

the military in washington, one of this weapon to function basically as a blast weapon like any other high explosive. in fact, it was essentially a firebomb, and most of the casualties at hiroshima and nagasaki were caused by the firestorm that followed the use of the weapon, not by radiation or even by the blast. so the issue really came down to something that, in the eyes of the people making the decision at the time, seemed to be, should we use a really big explosive, not an atomic bomb but a really big explosive, to convince the japanese to surrender? let me just throw in one other point here. we were so angry at the japanese by 1945. we knew we had basically destroyed their wartime economy. they were down to 1,000 calories per day per citizen. they were going to run down-

their record to run out of bullets. we cannot understand why they would not surrender. the hope was, as it was described, that this bomb would shock them into deciding that it was time to fold, and in fact it did. >> the other aspect of that same point, the japanese were known to be extremely proud. in iwo jima, they had fought to the death, and you had 20,000 dead, and then only about 1000 allow themselves to surrender. so the feeling was that perhaps the bomb, as this new form of revolutionary science, which have almost a mystical quality that would allow the japanese imperial army and navy to sort of surrender with dignity, to sort of feel to this greater power and say we cannot fight this. that was a large part of the thinking behind the notion that you would not warn them, that you could not test this weapon

in advance, which is a very popular thing that is now debated in schools. >> there was some effort, jenny, to say that there is going to be a major attack. so it was not a specific warning that we are going to drop an atomic bomb on you. >> it was a devastating attack warning. >> they warned of a devastating attack. scientists wanted them to explore further the idea of some sort of demonstration of the force of the weapon, and this was deemed not to be feasible, that the japanese might move american pows to the area where a test was to be made or something of that sort. plus, they had a limited number of bombs. they were making use of what they had, and the momentum was to try to force an end to the war as quickly as possible we live in a post-hiroshima world. i think sometimes we -- for the

domestic policy makers, they did not know all the details and implications of what we think of as the atomic bomb beforehand, so there was this thinking -- it is a much larger weapon. perhaps it will have the beneficial impact on the japanese. but not all policy makers thought these weapons would end the war. all the preparations for the invasion were continuing apace, and indeed, general marshall, was wondering, perhaps we will be able to use some of these bonds as part of the land invasion to, if you will, soften up the japanese defense is on that island. so the uncertainty of the policy-makers needs to be appreciated. >> send us the weapons themselves. >> yes, they were not sure how -- the one test -- >> the one bomb. still, morrison had a great

line. he said these were more complicated pieces of laboratory equipment and proven weapons. they did not have 100% confidence that they would work. they could work partially, and the worst case scenario, they could be a dud. he did not want to give advance warning of what might be a dead. also, these weapons had been tested -- one of them had been tested, but they had never been used in combat. these were very far from a predictable weapon, so the scientists had very grave questions about the outcome. now, bill, bring us up to speed. we talked a great deal about roosevelt. he has been briefed at every stage of this. he is the one that godfather the project and shepherded it through. he died before it had to be used. truman comes to office, and and two weeks he is in office before henry simpson finally brings in up to speed. tell us about that conversation.

>> truman had some limited familiarity with the manhattan project, only to the extent that he knew vast amounts of resources were being expended on this major infrastructure scheme, but no real knowledge of the atomic bomb. simpson mentions it briefly to him on his first day in office really. but it is two weeks, a serious briefing. a recent some, the secretary of war, he and general groves give truman a substantial briefing. truman has a whole series of issues on his plate. you can imagine him dealing with the war that is taking place in europe, worrying about the pacific war as well and the need to move troops across there, etc. difficult relations at this point with the soviets. while some historians want to say he focuses completely and begins to channel his decision making in light of the potential of the atomic bomb, i do not

think there is strong evidence to support that. he begins to look upon the bomb as a potential weapon that may help in ending the war. he goes off to the conference held in mid-july in the suburbs of berlin intent on gaining stalling's entry into the war against japan, died on getting joseph stalin's entry into the war against japan. looking ahead, not seeing these sort of alternate courses, that they drew the soviets in, this may obviate the need to use the bomb. for truman, it was hit them with everything to force their surrender as quickly as possible. it was not a either/or, it was a bothand/and.

he can see where his new secretary of state, burns, began to think perhaps we do not need the soviets involvement to the extent we thought we might have. but for truman, he was never involved in the atomic diplomacy machinations that some historians suggest. so he looks upon it as an opportunity to save american lives. he really was not -- i am not presenting him as a paragon of morality who was concerned about saving japanese lives. he wanted to end the war and save american lives, and that drove his thinking on this matter. it is the course of action that he pursued right through until the end i believe that subsequent to the use of the weapons, he did have serious considerations, moral qualms about it because he was living in a post-hiroshima world and he

began to see the damage that this one weapon did. >> we are going to look at the one clip that echoes what you just said, which will be some explaining his decision to use the bomb on hiroshima. remember, at this point, what you said to summarize is that it was really seen as the end of war, final and swift, and the idea was to save the maximum number of lives. and the value of the bomb at that point to policy-makers and to the president seemed to outweigh its risks down the line, which were still hazy, in their view, of the risks to civilization in the future. let's look at this clip. this is from the truman library archives. >> a short time ago, an american airplane dropped one bomb on hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.

that bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of tnt. the japanese began the war from the air at pearl harbor. they have been repaid many fold, and the end is not yet. with this bomb, we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. in their present form, these bonds are now in production, -- these bombs are now in production, and even more powerful forms are in development. it is an atomic bomb, a harnessing of the basic power of the universe, the force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the far east. we are now prepared to destroy, more rapidly and completely,

every productive enterprise the japanese have in any city. we shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. let there be no mistake, we shall completely destroy japan's power to make war. it was to spare the japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of july 26 was issued. their leaders promptly rejected the ultimatum. if they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen, and with the fighting skills of which they are already well aware. >> richard, the vast majority of

the los alamos scientists fully supported and later expressed no remorse at the using of the hiroshima bomb. that aside he was a different story. -- nagasaki was a different story. >> there was a sense i think that the bomb was used at nagasaki to quickly, not giving the japanese time to absorb what had happened before. and perhaps the beginnings of what you are calling a post- hiroshima state of mind, that these really were revolutionary weapons. i want to emphasize also, what actually happened at the end of the war, the bonds probably did not lead to the end of the war, the japanese surrender. the latest research by a american scholar would be that it was an invasion of manchuria, and then coming down and getting

very close to a qaeda, that led the japanese finally to decide that it was time to throw in the towel. however, i would like to emphasize as well that the emperor, who had to step into politics in an unprecedented way for the first time, used the bomb as a reason why he should do so and why he should give the weight of his authority to the peace party within the japanese government, so that, notably, when he broadcast his script to the japanese people on the 15th of august, he spoke specifically of a new and most terrible weapon of war as a reason why he and his people should accept the surrender. so the bomb had its part, i was taken almost as a psychological weapon. but the real determining factor seems to have been the fact that

the soviet union join the war. it had been neutral up to that point, and joseph stalin, when he got word of the bomb at hiroshima, he had not really believe there was such a thing before, even the scientists were working on it. when he heard of hiroshima, he moved up the time from the 15th of august when his country was supposed to start fighting the japanese to the eighth of august. >> that is a highly contested area, as you know. as to what actually caused the japanese surrender. while i think you are referring to the professor's book, while he wants to downplay the atomic bomb, i think it is hard to separate out . when you have this bill will punch against the japanese, have to separate the relative importance of the soviet declaration of war in quick

entry into the war, and the use of the atomic bombs, for me, i find the emperor's intervention decisive in the japanese surrender. even after the use of the bonds, even after the soviet declaration, the japanese military wanted to continue the fight. the japanese war cabinet is divided. it is 3-3 when they come to the emperor. that should have necessitated the resignation of the government, but the emperor decides to step down from the imperial throne and to join the discussion. when one looks at what motivated him, and i see him as the decisive figure, i see the bomb, the use of the bonds as much more important. so if he is the decisive figure and the bombs influenced him decisively, then i think one can draw a conclusion that the

atomic bombs are crucial in forcing japan to surrender at the time it takes place. this is a matter that historians enjoy engaging in debate and discussion, and this controversial decision has been much debated, sometimes presenting truman in a quite unfavorable light as knowing the japanese were on the verge of surrender, going ahead and using the bombs anyway. that interpretation i think should be confined to the dustbin. truman used the bomb primarily to defeat japan. that was his principal motivation, and of course to save american lives. and i believe it had the desired impact. i am not dismissing the contribution of the soviet declaration of war, but it is a joint thing. that is precisely what they were up 2. >> my general impression when

writing history, if there are five reasons, all five apply. i would add, though, that the largest air raid on japan, by our conventional bombers come as -- by our conventional bombers, was the 14th of august. it would be a way of basically telling the russians to back off because really the alternative to what happened would have been a divided japan like a divided germany, and i think we were most concerned to make sure that the russians made it a little encouragement down into the japanese -- made as little encouragement down into the japanese islands as possible. >> the military demand of the occupation of japan, wanting something similar, and they had declared war six days earlier. >> exactly. >> in terms of the soviets, all this time they are considering the war and the outcome of the

war, they are seriously worried about the post for ramifications of the use of the bomb, particularly in terms of the soviets. the scientists, one of the most outspoken leaders, but certainly conant' and bush, came to the view that you had to have complete international agreement to control these weapons or there would be a devastating arms race. the soviets were key to this agreement, but nobody thought it would be easy to bring the soviets to the table when we already have nuclear superiority, the nuclear edge. part of the feeling about using the bombs was that you would also shocked the soviets, that the fear that this weapon might inspire might make them more cooperative in postwar talks. >> i think it is clear that that somewhere factored in. certainly the thinking of bryant's, because he was approached by other scientists with this issue in mind, and

then when he went to london shortly after the war to have talks when he went to have talks with the soviets come he was talked famously of having a bomb in his pocket. >> that was a joking remark. i am not here to defend james byrnes, but what is notable in my view is how limited how limited -- is how limited the efforts were to use the atomic bomb in diplomacy. i think this is because german and burns were continuing the roselle policy -- i think this is because truman and burns were continuing the roosevelt policy. the comment was do you have a bomb in your pocket, so it needs

to be understood in context. take out a particular quotation delivered in a joking remark and suggest that jimmy burns was at the conference table threatening the soviets -- you know, if you do not agree to what i suggest, we will lob one into the kremlin -- that was hardly the approach at all. what is more notable is that acheson and david lilienthal, delegated by truman to come up with some kind of plan, come up with a reasonable plan for international control of the weapons. in late 1945 and into 1946, and most folks would say that the decision by burns and truman to put in a negotiator for that plan hamper the likelihood of its being accepted. but there were efforts made for international control in late

1945 and into 1946. >> but not stupendous efforts. richard? >> the lilienthal plan was developed by many that included as its chairman robert oppenheimer, and they really -- in a number of really hard business and engineering leaders. it was a plan that will ultimately bleadbe the way, with some modifications, that we get rid of nuclear weapons. >> quickly outline that plan. >> basically all aspects of development of nuclear energy would be under international control, from the mining of uranium ore to the production, etc., etc. >> and open to inspections. >> it did not have any mechanism for enforcement. there would not be a united nations army that would defend the mines are the factories.

oppenheimer explained -- of quote what if someone decides to cheat? what if someone decides to start building a bomb? oppenheimer said that would be an act of war, wouldn't it? meaning, means were distributed more or less equally around the world as they are today, and one country decided to cheat on an agreement to have a nuclear weapon, ultimately if diplomacy failed and conventional forces failed, the other countries could also begin to develop nuclear weapons again. at worst, we would come to today, to where we are right now, which is with nuclear weapons around the world on 15 minutes' warning time. that would be the worst case scenario under this plan. so i think in the long run, what oppenheimer and his committee put together made great sense. but it did not make sense to barauch. it did not take into account his point of view of who is going

to defend the mines and so forth. >> there was also the notion of secrecy. secrecy became a contentious issue at this time. the oppenheimer committee believe these scientific secrets could not be safeguarded, that they would the outcome of the science has a way of gaining a some momentum and it moves forward, and other scientists would, in other countries, develop these weapons in their own time. therefore, the secrecy was sort of a moot point. this was not a popular notion with everybody and not a popular notion with the u.s. military. this led to quite a division. explain, richard, where that took us as we come to the years post-hiroshima immediately. immediately, the super, necessarily. >> i'm not sure in the context what you mean. >> he was developing a superbomb that could be safeguarded to give us a

greater edge. >> well, i see this in the context of those years right after the war when we felt that we were secure internationally because we had sole monopoly on nuclear weapons. the soviets had never pulled all their troops out of europe. the had men on the ground in europe. we had come home in great numbers, leaving everything behind as we left. as one of the general said. but we had the bomb, and therefore even edward teller, who was normally paranoid about the soviet union throughout his life, went off to the university of chicago to work physics again, and felt so secure that he was writing articles about world government. you can imagine him writing such things. then the soviets finished their work with the help of espionage, to be sure, and tested their bomb in august of 1949, and the

balance was totally shaken as far as we were concerned. now they have those millions of men on the ground in europe and they have the bomb. teller's response was to champion the idea of a bigger bomb, the thermonuclear, hydrogen bomb, which would be triggered by an atomic bomb but would be capable of being built to any volume and scale that you wanted. that of course, in the course of about three months of work with president truman, became the next thing the united states was going to do to keep itself safe. >> bill, why did german embrace this idea? >> the discussion about whether to -- why did truman embrace this idea? >> the discussion about the decision to build a hydrogen bomb, in the end, proved a relatively easy decision for truman. it is the momentum of nuclear- weapons, the soviets having

obtained the a-bomb. german asked his advisers, are they likely to be working on an h-bomb? and the answer was, yes. and, by the way, that was the correct answer. of course, they were working. so this debate whether to proceed ahead pits in arguments some of the classic figures of the whole story of nuclear- weapons. of course, we have -- it pits paul metz against george kennan, robert and oppenheimer and can and are strongly opposed to proceeding with the h-bomb. they say any level of destruction that we need to threaten the soviets, the atomic bomb should suffice. but the military -- edward teller -- and in the end, dean acheson is the decisive figure

on this three-person committee with the secretary of defense, david lilienthal, the chairman of the atomic energy commission -- they recommend to truman -tw- one, you must proceed ahead. so of course they proceed ahead with the background of the korean war as additional momentum, and their fear that the soviets were somehow or other gaining momentum in this contest. the cold war is locked in place by this point, and that sort of dangerous feeling that somehow or other the soviets would march on the united states and have some sort of advantage over the united states, drives american decision making. this is the reason for the difficulty, a fear that the other side may get some sort of advantage and that they would

exploit it. i am rather glad to say we were never put in a position to see whether the soviets would have exploited such an advantage, although the cuban missile crisis is a pretty close case, obviously. >> let me throw in a couple of other names. a member of the scientific advisory committee, the atomic energy commission, made the points along with some of his colleagues that the decision to go ahead with a larger-scale weapon was a good time to try once again to negotiate with the soviet union some sort of control over these weapons. that was not attempted. that was left to one side because the president basically took the advice of dean acheson and his joint chiefs. oppenheimer argued, i think correctly, that these weapons

would be more dangerous to the united states, which has more major cities, then they would be to the soviet union, which has fewer cities. and therefore it was not to our manage to push this new technology that would represent weapons of megaton-scale yield. so there were good arguments of both any moral questions as to why it would have been a good idea not to go that way. >> and he and others already foresaw that you could have smaller nations, rogue nations, that the despots, and even for saw a black market -- even for saw a black market for supplies to build the bomb, and all of these discussions were brought up people often think we work the hard way. actually, many of these words discussed and foreseen by the scientists. let's look at eisenhower's

famous atoms for peace speech. he gave this speech in new york in 1953 before the u.n. general assembly. the audio is not very good, so bear with us. >> against the dark background of the atomic bomb, the united states does not wish merely to present strength, but also the desire and the hope for peace. the united states pledges before you, and therefore before the world, its determination to help solve the fearful atomic the llama. to devote its entire heart and mind the fearful atomic dilemma. but consecrated to his life. i again thank the delegates for

the great honor they have done me in inviting me to appear before them and listening -- and listening to me. >> the atomic dilemma -- what is going to be eisenhower and his incisors approach in the next few years? >> this was kind of the beginning of what led to the international atomic energy agency speech, and as well, and of course the time with the added influence of the cuban missile crisis, this was the beginning of the movement that led to the international agreement among countries not to develop nuclear weapons. in 1968. so eisenhower had several things in mind. one was the peaceful use of atomic energy being pushed as an alternative to people going nuclear in terms of weapons. we would supply that kind of knowledge and skill. we sent a lot of nuclear reactors around the world in the

months and years to come. most of them filled with weapons-grade uranium, by the way, which we are now desperately trying to recover from all over the world. at the time people did not think about it in that context, but that was one of the problems. eisenhower also had kind of an idea -- well, there was also beginning to be a nuclear power industry, and the soviets were perceived to be ahead in that line of work, so there was another aspect that was basically commercial that was involved in all of this period. .

and to put greater reliance upon at least the threat of nuclear weapons, and a number of times, that threat certainly implied, was made, during his administration, perhaps even in the ending of the korean war. certainly in the taiwan straits episode, and the eisenhower administration built up the american strategic bomber force and had a greater military alliance on nuclear weapons.

sort of a change from the truman strategy of nse 68, which have nuclear weapons and conventional forces, and much greater reliance, so he has that military side of it, while at the same time pushing atoms for peace, and i think that is part of the difficulty of being able to sell it, if you will, in the international community. folks seeing that contradiction. >> and i think the weapons in particular. >> yes. >> although there was the beginning of an agreement with the soviets in eisenhower's second term. eisenhower was actually pushing for a nuclear test ban and came very close. unfortunately, the plane that was shot down over the soviet union completely bollixed that summit, and made it impossible for christian, who was interested in the bargain, to follow through -- impossible for khrushchev, who was interested

in the bargain, to follow through. >> eisenhower was concerned that it dominated truman's thinking as well, how to assure that the soviets would not be cheating, if you will. cheating in their development. if there was to be an agreement, how would it be implemented? how would it be enforced? the development of that plane and the amazing photography it was capable of -- ike saw it as the perfect guaranteed to be able to look down and observe. eventually, it is not needed because of satellite reconnaissance, but -- >> he had tried something called open skies with the soviets, but they had not been willing to agree to it. >> the was suspicious of it would not agree to this city -- this inspection system, what must they be up to? there was the question of fear that drives so much of the arms race. >> in a sense, we're talking

about that eisenhower had to grapple with the fact that there has never been an international committee to police this kind of weapon before. we are talking about a new instrument, an international body, and no such body has ever existed before, and they are sort of trying, modeling to find their way into how to assemble this body and how were, whether it will have an army, how it will police, and it is a slow and clumsy process. >> when in 1960, the first, satellite started orbiting the earth, people that saw the film that came back from the satellites, which, by the way, was jettisoned from the satellite, fell down in a parachute into the air and was caught by a plane with a hook on its tail, as it were, extraordinary technology. [laughter] edwin land had developed the film package as part of his pole or a operation, so it was an

interesting piece of technology -- part of his polaroid operation appears someone said it was is that the curtain had been drawn reconciliation. suddenly, we could see the whole country and see it clearly, and that led to the discovery that the soviets essentially had no icpm's, which we have feared greatly, and kennedy had run for president on those grounds. it turned out there was not one, or there was, but it was in our favor by a longshot. >> we should probably take time for some questions. ok. pardon? ok. ok, first question. "you said that truman did not have moral qualms. were there any advisers or

leaders making a moral argument?" bill, you want to start us off? >> henry stimson, i think, had some major concerns, and his concerns are evident in his recognition of what cities would be attacked, etc. so they certainly come through, but they were not at a level where he was suggesting the bomb not be used, so he certainly is one of the senior advisor, who, i think, have some moral qualms. truman's motto qualms emerged quite quickly after the use of the weapon. someone wrote to truman after nagasaki and said, "i hope you have a third bomb that you can use." the secretary of commerce at the time courtroom as saying, "0, my

god, i can't bear the thought of killing more women and kids." he was getting the reports back and began to see what revolutionary kind of weapon this was an irradiation, etc., etc. so his own moral qualms developed while harry truman maintained right through his life that he did not have regrets about the decision. that it was a decision that has saved not only american lives, but saved literally thousands and thousands of japanese lives. so he held firmly to that in his public stance. i think he felt the responsibility of the action. i want to suggest that he had his own sort of moral wrestling with the irresponsibility that he carried on his shoulders. any american president, i think, would have made the decision he

made, but the burden had come to him. he had taken it, and he had to live with that decision, which i think he still believed was the right one, but it was a morally complex one. >> there was a navy officer on the interim committee that was deciding about these issues, who was quite adamant that this was not a weapon of war, but this was a weapon of mass destruction that had no place whatsoever in the american arsenal. and truman -- and i can say this because i am a native of independence, missouri, where president truman coming up to be photographed have been part of my childhood. truman really was a stubborn man, and someone who, once he made a decision, was determined that it was the right decision and that he was not going to rethink it. in that, i think he shared a little bit of that quality with george w. bush, so it was not

like truman to say later that he was wrong, but it is very clear that he was someone who was as horrified by the destructive effects on civilians of this weapon, as was the rest of the world. although you find very little protest, very little response. the only organization i could identify from the press in 1945 was the national council of churches, who raised questions about the use of this weapon. >> the secretary of the national council of churches wrote to truman, and truman responded back in a fairly vigorous fashion, saying that the japanese attacked pearl harbor. they were going to continue in their resistance. this was the necessary course of action. so, i mean, he responded back to criticism from a moral point of view. >> famously, when robert

oppenheimer would to see him and said, "i have blood on my hands," chairman said, "get that son of a bitch out of my office. i never want to talk to him again." >> oppenheimers opinion did not reflect the majority of the scientific community. my grandfather once said that the battlefield is no place to question the doctrine that the end justifies the means. you do that in peacetime. remember the scientists were developing a range of weapons, and then, as now, chemical weapons were a very rapidly advancing technology. they had no doubt that they would soon have viral agents that could be introduced that would be a threat to the globe. so you had other deadly weapons on the horizon that would have to be controlled. they had developed these terrible incendiary weapons that had killed hundreds of thousands in japan, so i can, the bomb was not out in different moral order -- again, the bomb was not from a different moral order.

so truman was also responding here to the advice he was getting from his military and scientific leaders that this was really not a moral question. we have, i believe, a question from the audience. mr. sorenson. i have heard -- >> i have heard that the hiroshima bomb was enough to convince the japanese, but they would not yield on the emperor, and therefore, the nagasaki bomb went ahead. they still would not yield on the emperor, and the u.s. said, "ok, keep your temper." -- keep your emperor." is that true? >> most people see that the nagasaki bomb came so quickly after hiroshima. the japanese were still in discussions about what their

response would be. i do not think their decision making was sufficiently clear cut. what is clear is the americans, who had not conceded on the matter of the emperor before hand, once the japanese sued for peace, gave an assurance that the emperor could stay, subject to the authority of the american occupation commander, who was of course going to be douglas macarthur. that was a quite substantial qualification of the emperor's role, so, sure, they were saying that the emperor could stay, but it was going to be a different type of emperor than had existed prior to the japanese surrendered. >> one of the reasons that has been lost as to why, we were

prepared at that date to accept some role for the japanese emperor. i think that had a great deal to do with our concern about whether the japanese people would indeed laid down their arms -- lay down their arms or whether they would continue at whatever level to fight the occupation. it seemed clear that we basically decapitated the japanese state, that we would be putting the country into chaos, and it would be much better to keep their structure, subject to the authority of the century and we were sending in, rather than simply make the whole place fall apart -- authority of the century and we were sending in rather than simply make the whole place fall apart. once the bombs were released to the military, the idea was to simply keep using them as military weapons with no necessary orders from washington, even though, of course all this other stuff was going on. i talked with some of the

scientists who put the nagasaki bomb together, and all emphasized that they felt that every day that was delayed in assembling it, especially since there was a typo in coming, it might then have delayed the drop until the middle or late august, was a day when more american lives were lost. louis alvarez told me that he liked to go look around and check things out. he said he went over to some of the ships in harbour, and they were all loaded and ready for the invasion. he said that really galvanized their efforts. >> one of the questions from our audience was, "in terms of the scale of the manhattan project, a number of people working, billions of dollars devoted,

house secret really was it? -- was -- how secret really was it?" >> it was extremely secret. some of these people did not even know what they were building. there would come in, and is a chemical weill's would go out the other end in the hands of a secret intelligence agent. it was a great mystery, and the press in the united states cooperated in not publishing any stories. there was the comic strip with superman using atomic power in some way, and the cartoonist was called in by the fbi and told to leave that alone and change the subject. it was very much a national secret. it is extraordinary to think of it today. how long could we keep such a secret? >> even electricians and engineers and road builders who were up a project did not tell their families what they were doing and where they had been, the secrecy was observed really quite far down the ranks. >> the scientist figured it out

fairly quickly, and so did other people who have some kind of knowledge of the science involved. >> we have a question when someone asks where their projects like manhattan in germany and japan and how close were they? really, the question should be in russia. how close were they? >> stalin thought this was disinformation that he was getting, so the russian project was hampered by that. he never funded the program beyond the laboratory scale until hiroshima and the film the russians took at hiroshima /nagasaki. when that reached moscow and he saw the destruction, he suddenly believed that this was a serious thing. so the russians were never very far along. the japanese were even less far along. they started working on a bomb quite early, and i think, by the way, that should be weighed in the scale to the question of the

moral issue of using nuclear weapons. i have no doubt that the japanese military would have bombed as if they finished their bomb in time -- i have no doubt that the japanese military but have bombed us. the scale was such that it took a third of the national electric supply just to run the reactor to make plutonium and so forth, so they understood early that there was no way they would be able to do this in time for war, and there were no other countries -- germany never got beyond working on a reactor they had at the end of the war of 50% scale reactor, fuelled with uranium, metal, and heavy water, which is to say that of the bill won twice as big, it would have had a functioning reactor. so they were still at the experimental level as well. there has been a fascinating and interesting question. heisenberg, after the war, wrote

an article in the "journal of nature" and implied that they had decided not to get a bomb, and this, i think, was false. the fact is they manage to get lost in all of the curious politics of academia and so forth. heisenberg never was able to see the scale. he talked of the german who ran the industry in germany. you told him, and said, "you can have whatever you want. what do you need?" he said that we needed to build a little cyclotron and then build a bigger one, and then we can go on to it and so forth, and he took his hands, think this was useless. hitler himself never really got the idea, and he was much more interested in rockets, which was good for us.

so no one else really was in a position in terms of the sheer industrial capacity that the united states had availle in the midst of a major world war. >> and the british scientists certainly were aware of what was going on, and they were to some extent drawn into the manhattan project, although church obam -- although churchill always worried, and they were in fairly heavy discussions towards the end of the war and then after the war, as to what role the bricks might have in gaining access to all the technology to which they had contributed, so they could develop a british bomb. >> but in fact, we cut of great britain, refused to let them share in or that we were getting from south africa after the war, even though we had agreed to do

so. it was a great scandal at the term. in fact, it was our refusal to cooperate with great britain that i think led to the decision that they were going to develop an independent weapon and did so. >> audience member would like to know how close we came to dropping a bomb on germany, how serious we were about that. >> i think very serious if a bomb had been available for use. the bomb was developed to be used against hitler's germany, so i think it is quite reasonable to suggest that was the military planning, but, of course, the war in europe ended in the first week of may, and, of course, the tests came in july. >> the question on moral qualms, this is one of the murky areas. for many of the refugee scientists, basically, there was no moral qualms about dropping

in on the third reich. many of the refugees scientists have more moral qualms about using it against the japanese. interestingly enough, it complicated the picture. >> general gerson answer the question, who ran the manhattan project for the court engineers? he answered the question many times, and he specifically said, had they had won in 1943, they certainly would have used it, but someone pointed out that the bomb was always planned for chopping the air plannedb-29 -- the bomb was always planned for dropping via the b-29. >> another question i have here from an audience member is this fear of the thousand-year right motivated this huge development

of the manhattan project, could a similar fear of nuclear proliferation today now trigger an equally large massive commitment to disarmament? >> i think it is. i'd think that is exactly what we are seeing happen since president obama took office and before that in the efforts of the group that was essentially hoover veterans of the summit. we'll be talking about some of that this happened, but george shultz and his group are around stanford and the hoover institution have been immensely active in the last three years in trying to move toward an international commitment to get to zero nuclear weapons. i'd think we are beginning to see a little bit of progress. it is an immensely complicated problem. the next step is probably going to be for president obama to announce that we have reduced

our arsenal to about 1000 weapons, and then we'll go down from there in concert with others. there are a lot of political issues to resolve and security issues among various states are around the world before we do that, but i think the process is underway. >> bill, why don't you finish us off? >> i think that will be a very challenging process, precisely because the same issues that defined so much of what we have talked about in the early part of the session and nuclear- weapons -- the fear of what the other side may have, whoever that other side may be, is always a kind of break on the decision of any american president to risk nuclear disarmament. >> the other side in this case

also being democrats and republicans because many of these issues have not been international issues at all. they have been political issues within domestic politics of the united states. >> [inaudible] join me in thanking this fabulous panel. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2009] >> next on c-span, former white house advisor is on presidents and foreign affairs after the cold war. then, a review of the 2008 elections with an eye towards the future of the political parties. >> saturday, a look back at the cuban missile crisis. also, have world threats been over height in the post-cold war

world? sunday, two programs are democracy and the internet, including a university of virginia panel on how the political process has been affected by the internet, and the founder of facebook on how social networking is changing the political process. this holiday weekend on c-span. >> now, recent presidential advisor on international events after the cold war. this is part of a forum on the ball of the berlin wall. it is about an hour and 50 minutes. >> i would like to welcome you all to our second panel today. it is a pleasure and honor to have the distinguished policy makers who also happen to be superb analysts of u.s. foreign policy all on one panel. each of them has served in at least two of the three presidency's between the fall of the berlin wall and the obama

administration. they have worked at the highest levels of government on the national security council in the pentagon and the state department and in and this is a broad, and they are people, and we can learn something about the experience of making strategy in a complex conditions the country has faced in the past 20 years. let me briefly introduced the panel, especially as it relates to the aftermath of 9/11 and strategy under uncertainty. eric edelman has served in government closely as a career foreign service officer. related to the fall of the berlin wall, he worked in the u.s. embassy in moscow and then return to work in the state department, and then as assistant deputy undersecretary of defense for soviet and east european affairs from 1989 to 1993. after 9/11, he was a principal deputy assistant to the vice-

president, that is richard cheney, for national security affairs from 2001 to 2003 and ambassador to turkey from 2003 to 2005, and he was u.s. undersecretary of defense policy from 2005 to 2009. he is currently a distinguished fellow at the center for strategic and budgetary assessments working on national security policy strategy and alliance issues. walter slocum, who has extensive experience in government over the last four years, brings a perspective on dealing with the longer-term aftermath of the new international environment created by the fall of the wall and a collapse of the soviet union. was i disagree of defense for policy in the clinton administration from 1994 to 2001. also serve dr. 9/11 and senior advisor for national defense in the collision provisional authority for iraq in 2003. in 2000 for, president george de b. bush appointed him to the commission on the intelligence capability of the united states regarding weapons of mass destruction.

he is currently a lawyer with a washington firm. finally, it clear from the home team, and prof. of history at uva and former director of the miller center. he is both a stellar scholar and accomplice policymaker. let me just mention a few facts relative to him for this panel. he served on the national security council during the george h. w. bush administration and along with condoleezza rice co-authored one of the studies of the fall of the law and its aftermath. he had a hand in drafting the bush administration opposes 2002 national security strategy. he supervised work of the 9/11 commission, producing arguably the most influential such reports in u.s. history, and undoubtedly the most readable from 2005 to do as an 7, he was a counselor of the department of state. i am a professor here at uva and a fellow here at the miller center, and i'll try to heard

these three gentlemen, which will be no easy task. i ask you all before we get going, please turn off your cell phone. even if they are on bribery, they get in a way of the communication in a room -- even as they are on vibrate. i would get 15 minutes per person, and i will make a few comments, and then we will open it up for q&a and discussion. >> thanks. i will lead by example first by turning off my blackberry. thank you very much and i thank the people who organize the conference for giving me an opportunity to take up the subject and exercise a part of my brain that i thought i had left behind when i left the academy and joined the foreign service as a first-class of foreign intelligence officers taken after the hostages were seized in tehran.

i have i guess the benefit or may be burdened -- i'm not sure which -- of having served in all three of the administration's that we are talking about, both bush 41, the clinton administration where i worked briefly for walt, and in later with him, and then the 43 administration, and worked there with philip on a number of issues, so i am actually pleased to be on this panel with both of them. i chose to focus on a narrow subject, which was what paul wolfowitz earlier called today the infamous 1992 defense planning guidance. that was the very same term that derricks l.a. and general tire used to describe it as well. if you go with, you will come up with something like 90,000 hits. i think the only other national security document that comes

even close is nsc 68 -- a few google -- if you google it. the dpg has been the subject of all sorts of speculation. fitzgerald in the "new yorker review" books said it was a minority view and bush 41 and became a majority view in bush 43 and suggested that it was not only suggested by her but others that this was an effort to sketch out what some people called a plan for global domination by the united states or for the united states to act as global cop as the "wall street journal" said at the

time when the document leaked, and that somehow, you could draw a state line the 1992 defense planning guidance and the bush doctrine, particularly the emphasis in the national security strategy of 2002 on the notion of pre-empting wmd threat. that is repeated in endless blog posts, if you look through it, and any number of scholars have picked this up as well, when it is attributed to a new conservative theory and stopping the first group -- cold war with the liberation of kuwait, rather than going to baghdad and getting rid of saddam. she said they responded by producing from the bowels of the pentagon a new national defense policy document called the defense planning guidance. other critics have joined as well, and i think the only problem with the narrative, which has now found its way not

only from scholarly work but into the nation's public debate, is that it, i think, distorts the draft in history and the content of the original and confers much greater influence on the opposite of that document -- the authors of that document that is warranted. what explains that in the first instance? first, the dpg -- and is now possible to have a more dispassionate discussion of this because many of the draft of the document have now been declassified. there were declassified in december 2007 and are available on the national security archive website -- they were declassified in december 2007. it was leaked in the first instance in march of 1992. and it was, i think, arguably from the context of the leak, not least by someone who was empathetic to the document because it was given to pat

tyler of the "new york times" and he wrote about it in a way that suggested that the document calls for ways to the more challenges to the primacy of america by our other allies and at the pentagon document -- this is a quotation from his article of march 8, 1992 -- "articulates the clearest rejected to date of collective internationalism." that first news story set the tone for all future discussion of the document. over the course of a couple of days, tyler and barred gelman of the "washington post" wrote about the document -- tither and part gelman -- tyler and bart gelman. at the time, the judge is a staff had not read the document, and it came out immediately in the midst of the

1992 presidential campaign, so the press immediately but to various presidential contenders and political figures to get reaction. pat buchanan said that the dpg was virtually a blank check given to of america's friends and allies that will go to war to defend their interests, which was bought for a document that was supposedly so unilateral. and to protect politics makes strange bedfellows, democrats were quick to join in. joe biden said that the pentagon vision reverts to an old notion of the united states as the world's policeman, and he suggested the united states pursue the next civilization, which he described as collective powers to the united nations. george stephanopoulos, speaking for the presidential candidate bill clinton, argue that the pentagon was merely trying to hang onto large defense budgets instead of accepting spending cuts, and alan cranston said that the pentagon want to make sure that the united states was the only main honshu on the world bloc, the global big

enchilada. the following day, tyler reported that bureaucratic trouble warfare had broken out. i'm shocked. saying that senior white house officials have harshly criticized the draft pentagon policy statements. one administration official was quoted as saying that the report was "a dumb report that in no way or shape represents u.s. policy." lost in this world of all of this was the simple fact that the pentagon spokesman pointed out, which was that because this had not been circulated at high levels or even very widely in the government, and lot of people are making comments about a document they had not actually ever read. gelman tried to, i think, do a better job of setting the document in some context, but by and large, first impressions are very hard to shake.

i think looking back on it, what is striking about the press coverage is that it was a very typical washington story, which reflected a lot of the sort of not invented here syndrome that goes on bureaucratically in washington and where critics did not put forward an alternative strategy at all but just chose to common harshly about a document that most of them had not read in was still in early preparatory stages. to go back to the document itself, the origins of the dpg go back to some of the things to paul wolfowitz talked about this morning. in the fall of 1989, then secretary cheney had directed a consideration of a large funding reduction and the programmatic implications of the new security environment, so george stephanopoulos, the contrary notwithstanding, this is not a document about increasing the pentagon budget. this was a document about how to

deal with what was likely to be declining resources for defense. at the direction of both cheney and powell will force, those involved in the effort a trip in advertising -- and here, i have been accused in some of the studies that appear to have been one of the authors, and that is only true in a very technical sense. i was a responsible for drafting one section, which was the section on the soviet union and central and eastern europe, and if one looks at the documents, you will see any number of memos to scooter, to paul st. that the document is not quite complete yet because the soviet section is being rewritten, and i plead guilty. i was pretty bad about keeping up with this, but things were moving quickly. the drafting of the process began in june of 1991, and a

couple of things happened between june 1991 and march of 1992 when the document leaked, the most important being that the soviet union broke up, which seemed like an act we would have taken into account. scooter and his colleagues went back and look at the drafting of it. in january of 1990, there had been a previous defense planning guidance, which foresaw correctly reduced soviet conventional threat and raised the issue of reorientation of force planning towards the emergence of regional threats, particularly in southwest asia. the result was to be a new defense strategy and base force structure, and that resulted from a lot of work that paul, scooter, and others did for secretary cheney. it was provided to president bush by the secretary, and bush said it was a great idea, and he needed to give it in a speech, so a speech was said to be given in aspen, colorado, in

august of 1990. unfortunately, the speech which was given that day -- you can find it in the bush library -- got completely lost in the noise of the invasion about 24 hours earlier of kuwait. in a memoir, president bush mentioned at the speech in aspen, but never actually talk about the subject. nor do they mention the defense planning guidance, and i will come back to that later. what bush announced that day was the u.s. acted before us is would be reduced by about 25% to the lowest level since 1950, and this is the important part, that united states would be ill served by forces that represent nothing more than a scale back or shrunken down version of the forces we possess right now. if we simply press our texas, cut equally across the board, we could easily end up with more than we need for contingencies that are no longer an unlikely and less than we might need for

emerging challenges. what we need are not merely reductions but restructuring. then, he summarized the defense plan as follows -- "we want to- work to guide our delivered reaction to no more than the forces we need. we want to have the forces be able to exercise areas to respond to crises, to retain the capacity to rebuild our forces should that be needed" -- paul mentioned that today to. i think the major departure in a speech was the notion of a hedging strategy in the form of reconstitution, but the general outline on a reduced force structure begin the basis on which further refinements would be built. the document itself -- i think

the documents that have been released make clear the, starting with everything that call gave the defense policy resources board in june 1991, that the dpg was meant to be grounded in the defense strategy outlined in aspen but would build on the lessons learned from the persian gulf war that had been just concluded a few months earlier, and scooter was at the time leading a congressional remanded study about the conduct of the gulf war, from which lessens would be derived and assessed in the context of the military technical revolution or what later became called the revolution in military affairs. that is something a professor west and talked about a little bit today. the initial draft, of course, was based on the end of the soviet empire in europe. it has declined to ended -- a conventional threat, but now the threats were set to outpace our ability to draft the document, and it looked like the soviet union was about to break up. the communist party's hegemony

had been overthrown, and we were now looking at the prospect of democratizing russia. let me briefly then, having outlined what was in the document, say a few things that were added. paul talked-about anchoring u.s. leadership within our system, democratic alliances, to make sure that we did not -- that we could extend the system of collective security to eastern europe, or as it was later put in one of the later draft, extending his own a piece -- extending the zone of peace. there was a myth that there was a revised data tinting to walk back from some of the earlier statements that came out in the leaked version, but if you compare that to the document that comes a struggle over time rather than weaker and was ultimately publicly released in a somewhat redacted version as the regional defense strategy in january of 1993, at which time it was barely noticed in the press.

what was the significance of the document? paul talked a little bit about the differences over ukraine this morning. i think that was actually a very important point. if you read secretary baker's memoirs, you find that he was extremely angry about the leak in the fall of 1991 about interagency differences over ukraine. he said he was furious and felt sandbagged. there's no question that secretary baker's anger was quite real, and i'm sure it was still lingering the bawling spring when the dpg was first leaked. the other part i'd think that is important here is that as a number of scholars have pointed out, this is one of the very few efforts to step back and take a

really long look. george sharing in his recent kind of material history of american policy history argues the same thing. how does the dpg stand up, and what is its relationship to the 1992 national security strategy? first, on the national security strategy, i will let philip speak to that in more detail, as he does in his paper. my recollection is that that was largely an effort driven by condi rice and steve hadley with a look at their very able penn -- with philip as their very able pen on the issue. the office of the secretary of defense did not have a decisive influence. there was some discussion that this "muscular idealism" in the september to dawson to document was an unabashed -- september

2002 was an unabashed abatement -- the word preemption does not appear in any of the drafts, and the nsf is a different document drafted by different people for different purposes. when one thinks about what has been written in the academic community or what was being written at the time about what might happen with the fall of the wall, a lot of discussion about back to the future, europe becoming a dangerous multipolar place of insecurity, the need for a concert dissolution of nato -- in the end, i think the dpg stands up pretty well. forecasts a prolonged time of u.s. primacy and sought to extend as much as possible on the basis of building on our alliance structures rather than tearing them down. i think the episode is well

worth studying because it indicates some of the difficulties that people have when they try and engage in this kind of thing in the current environment we have where the press is a sort of ubiquitous presence in the governing process. i think it makes it extremely difficult to carry for this kind of effort, which as the nsc 68 example suggests our best conducted by small groups of people with guidance and direction. finally, let me just say that one thing that has occurred to me as i have done the study has been that we now face -- and i put this on the agenda for the scholars in the audience -- we now face a circumstance in which the amount of material being generated by the bureaucracy threatens i think to overwhelm the ability of scholars to conduct research.

mel's book on the truman administration benefited from an enormous deep dive into a lot of archival material that has been not previously exploited, particularly the planning of the joint chiefs of staff. and did a prodigious piece of work on that. i was talking with archivist at the national archives recently who told a that the mills of the bush 43 administration now by the national archives, and there are 1 billion or so. house dollars are going to wrap their minds around the literally millions of pages is a very big challenge that people are going to have to face, and whether people are going to need to dive deeply or we are going to have to have some kind of scholarly division of labor where people do deep dives into very narrow

subjects and then other people try to synthesize the material i think is the only way human minds are going to be able to get their heads around this. >> thank you very much. >> in spite of the introduction, which emphasized my work in iraq, i am a democrat. i served in both the carter and clinton administrations, so i am glad to have an opportunity to be the only person to say something nice about president clinton in its proceedings. it is also a special privilege that done drysdale is here, who is also one of my mentors.

i want to take -- in a way like eric, i want to take a particular case to try to survey the whole history of the clinton administration. that is the relationship with russia. because the clinton administration came to office at a special time in american history because of this profound change in the soviet union, and indeed, other changes. people mentioned briefly the rise of democracy in latin america, a profound change at the end of apartheid, which was coming in south africa, and a variety of other things. and central to this to the administration was the question of russia because i think in general, the of mr. jeanne kane

into office thinking foreign- policy, although important, would be a secondary consideration, but i think they also saw that there was an opportunity, and one of the themes of the paper that i have done is that sometimes crises of opportunity are more difficult to deal with than a crisis of challenge. many of you at least have been exposed to these arguments, but if you look at the way people that money or make choices, they are more interested in preserving what they have been in a chance to get more, and i think that's maybe true of governments as well. it was clearly a recognition that the future of russia was probably the most important single long-term foreign policy challenge the administration would face, and that it was very much in the interest of the united states to try to shape that future. the objective was a rush of that

would be internally democratic, economically successful and therefore likely to be internationally constructive and integrated into the global structures. critically as a means to that end, the clinton administration and particularly president clinton and his chief adviser on russia saw boris yeltsin, the newly elected president of the russian federation, as the best and perhaps only hope for a russian leadership committed to this kind of transition. throughout the eight years of president clinton's terms, no foreign policy project had a higher priority than supporting yeltsin. it was not that people had illusions about the challenges internally in russia that yeltsin faced or indeed the president's own personal and

political limitations. one of the surprising tidbits of this is that richard nixon lived several months in -- and to clinton's term, and communicated with clinton who took his advice quite seriously. at one point, he went to see strobe talbott and said yeltsin may be a drunk, but he was the best they're likely to get out of that screwed up country. they had to keep him from becoming there any or being replaced by someone who wants to be their enemy, and that is not a bad summary of what the administration tried to do. clinton moved to try to build a personal relationship with yeltsin, and he did a lot of specific things -- more money for economic assistance, getting russia admitted to the so-called g-eight, which required refocusing from economics to political situate the -- considerations. it appears the clinton, who was a very successful politician, had a lot of sympathy.

i did not see the president that often, but i did once have the privilege of briefing him before a meeting with yeltsin, one of the administration clearly mean, we correctly, pulled its punches. he said if we had a situation anything like chechnya in the united states, we might be tempted to do the kinds of things yeltsin is doing, and i understand why yeltsin has to act the way he is doing, but the problems build up very quickly. internal opposition in russia turned out to be much more deeply entrenched and stronger than people, including yeltsin, thought. the reformers who serve yeltsin in the early years failed either to produce results in the economy and the society or to

produce a kind of political base that would at least to some degree give them a protection against the opposition. so there were a lot of problems. i think part of it is the example vacation of the point that was made in the previous session -- exemplification of the point that was made in the previous session that single party strategies are seldom workable. first of all, there's a problem with the nation of priorities. the top priority to and depending the gatt does that mean that people you have gotten 100% confidence on it that you will not spend a penny on asia. it is a question of relative balance. the administration quickly realized that there were a lot of other issues that had to be addressed. bosnia was one. the russians, for a variety of reasons, were massively unsupportive. did not make much difference for quite a long time. british and french were equally

unsupporteive. when they were prepared to take stronger action on one of the things i am deeply pleased about is the beginning of the war crimes trial. russians in fact were not terribly vigorous in their opposition and were persuaded to send military units to participate in the nato-led intervention force, and there were very complicated issues about the relationship with the russian forces to the nato command, and that issue brought to before the issue of nato enlargement, which we have talked about earlier in this conference. there was no question but 1994 -- by 1994 that there was very strong pressure in central and eastern europe, their strong desire to join the alliance,

that this was probably going to happen, and the russians were adamantly opposed for a variety of reasons, and one of the biggest challenges was to so manage the relationship with russia that it was possible to go forward with enlargement without an open break with moscow, and by and large, that was a success. but it was an ear to and in relationship with russia. i think there is a very strong case for the strategy in pursuing both lunate an enlargement and cooperation with russia -- but it wasn't irritate -- it was an irritant in the relationship with russia. a critical diplomatic success, which was largely attributed -- attributable to tell but personally, was getting the

russians mostly through the influence of yeltsin, to tell milosevic that the russians were not going to pull these chestnuts out of the fire. at that point, with the culmination of a sustained bombing campaign and with very real prospect of ground troops, milosevic capitulated. and so there were some successes. russia withdrew its troops almost everywhere, and significance is illustrated by the problem of moldova, which is almost the only place they did not withdraw, and some places in the caucasus, that getting the russians to actually make the withdrawal that they were committed to was a major accomplishment. second, and paul wolfowitz mentioned this this morning, was getting -- eliminating the nuclear weapons that had been

left behind by the soviet union in ukraine, belarus, and cause extend -- khazakstan. but in terms of restructuring russia, yeltsin, i think, has to be said, was not in any sense successful, and the russia that we see today may resemble the russia -- i think it is a good deal like andropov probably hoped to create. that is the kgb model of a modern, effective, more or less, russia. so what went wrong? what were the problems? i think the administration, like yeltsin and the russian reformers, simply

underestimated the magnitude of the task. 70 years of communism had a much more profound deleterious effect on russia than it had in the shorter time in central and eastern europe. . yeltsin proved to be a weak read. not better summarize then by yeltsin himself in a speech when

he announced handing over of power, intended handing over power to putin on the day the millennium turned. he said, i ask your forgiveness for the dreams we have shared but that have never came true. he had a good speech writer. for the fact that what seemed simple turned out to be torturously difficult. i ask forgiveness for not justifying the hope that we could in one fell swoop lead from a gray, stagnant totalitarian past into a bright, rich, civilized future. it turned out, i was naive about some things. the problems were more complicated than i realized. we bowled our way forward through mistakes and failures. many people suffered terrible shock in these hard times. >> thank you very much. >> the conference is about strategic planning in these

great moments of world history. as jeff mentioned, i had a ringside seat at brief moments in a couple of these episodes. but it is important to resist the temptation that one reviewer described to churchill, after reading his memoir of the first ford war, commented that winston has written his memoirs which will -- he styled as a history of the world. my memoir is not a history of the world. but on the issue of strategic planning, perhaps a couple of insights can be gained by looking at these two great periods of low would change in 1989-1990 and 2001-2002. what do we mean by strategic planning? what i mean is readiness. intellectual readiness and institutional readiness. how to produce that readiness.

the great contrast and my overarching thesis, is that great contrast between 1989 and 1989 -- 1990, and 2001, 2002, in the first place strategic planning benefit because we are adapting existing lease and institutions. adapting them, i think, in a risky, radical and innovative way in many cases. but the ability to adapt existing beliefs and institutions is very important. in the second case, 2001-2002, i think is a mixture of some successes and some failures. but it is above all a period of improvisation and and mentioned. sometimes desperate improvisation and unmentioned. rapidly trying to develop a believes about new kinds of problems and capabilities and improvised institutions or trying to get existing institutions to do things that were quite unfamiliar.

and doing so under conditions of great urgency and stress. let me dig a little bit deeper in these two periods and tried to break them down. in the first period, the bush 41 administration, i think it would be very useful to break this period down actually into three parts. the first part -- let us just call it 1989, by which i mean, really from about january until august of 1989. this is a period in which the united states relationship to the great events occurring in central eastern europe, or in china, are important but not essentials. here again, a memoir of accounting american experience in the spring of 1989 is not a history of the world. i have an essay in the current issue of "foreign affairs" that

says a little bit more about my argument about what happened in 1989 and why, but to give you the 10-second version, the 1989 evens, i think, is more a story of european history or east asian history than it is a story of american history or even a story of u.s.-soviet relations. there is a hinge period identified especially in the late 1970's and early 1980's, where you actually see european actors -- actors as essentials in determining the outcome, of the swing states in this momentous period in world politics which plays out into 1989. important, but not central. why then focus on the period up to august 1989 at all? because even though we are important but not essential -- it is a decisive period in

american strategic planning. my argument is the period before the opening of the berlin wall was active in the period of decisive strategic planning for what happened after the berlin wall. one way to notice when critical periods of strategic planning -- judge when you think that administration really develops its habits of thought and habits of action. and then begins to believe in those habits so they become reenforcing routines. for the bush 41 administration, that occurred in the spring and summer of 1989. the paper said something about this in a dickens of may 1989 nato summit and all the surrounding events and some of the developments during that period and ticks off eight or nine different ways in which to that period of realism and the habits of thought and actions that are going to make it much easier for them to adapt when all of the sudden it accelerated

and then it began more rapidly deploying habits and the goals that they had already developed. the second phase of which 41 period, lettuce: 1980 -- 1990 but it really begins august 1989. a critical american actions -- the focus really shifts a lot beginning in august of 1989 and the development in poland. and then development in journey become increasingly salient as you work into september and especially october by which time we are going full blast on german issues before the wall opens. and a lot of ideas were already being developed and employed, including west germany. at this point, the u.s. is central. it is not dominant, not a dominant actor but is a central actor and remains a central actor for about the balance of

1989 and throughout 1990. i want go into all but illustrations of this -- all the issues surrounding the european settlement of which germany was a part. others can mention. the history was well known. but take the poland's case, which is much less studied and much less well understood. here is: it trying to emerge from communism. what is the american role of making that looks successful to the people? the shock therapy program which is the decisive experiments of this new democracy. creating a political economy outside of communism. the american role in this shock therapy story is central. americans helped work with the government, to develop a reciprocal set up bargains in which the americans helped mobilize the international community for things like the stabilization, creation of g-24,

even european bank of reconstruction and development which finally found a safe place. that is a very interesting phase of history in which the u.s. role is essential role, but a lot of the plans that are being pursued actually draw on an intellectual and institutional readiness that is already there coming out of the developments before the wall opened. there are two other observations of one to make about the 1990 period and then move on. the second observation is one key reason why the americans are successful, relatively successful, during this period, is to underscore a point that actually is made in a book on a wider subject -- a recent book in which he really stress is the significance of what their people believe they have a viable alternative at moments of

great challenge. by the way, he argues the belief and whether they have a viable alternative may be right or wrong, but it is really important whether they think there is a viable alternative and what it is. and the police are that actually help shape whether or not transformation actually happens -- and the belief exactly what helps shape. they see needs and problems but they don't really analyze the policy alternatives and -- as perceived by people at the time as a decisive factor. u.s. adaptation of the existing beliefs in institutions in the ways zoellick explained a lot and so on all helped make that look like a viable alternative on a number of levels for the east german people voting in march of 1990, to the germans as a whole, to the soviets, a lot of different audiences. we conjured up a scenario that looked like a viable alternative that you could go ahead and steer for and the challenge on

the other side then is, you have an alternative that is equally credible or viable that you can pull together under the incredible pace of time and momentum that we are actually helping to manufacturer? because we think it will help our vision be there. -- prevailed. that is important. the third one that i think will come back later this afternoon, is actually radicalism of the american approach. relying on existing petition so much, it seems ho-hum, that we will roll downhill into stuff that is already there. i don't want to go into a lengthy excursion, but suffice it to say that is not the way it was perceived at the time. there are a number of risks deliberately courted, and mainly the nature were short-term risks that the whole train would derail with the hope that actually you were going for an outcome that would give you much greater long-term safety. you would end up getting into a

safe harbor that you knew even though the journey into that, through that channel, would be very difficult. let me close with a comment on the 1991 period. the 1991 period i think is less -- especially the issues are rising self-determination in the former soviet union and in yugoslavia, the bush administration does not have a master script. it is not well-prepared either intellectually or institutionally to handle all of those problems. it doesn't really know quite what to do, and it shows in a variety of different ways. so you see some, i think, degradation and the quality of the policy in 1991 and 1992 offset by the fact they are continuing to steamroll it successfully fought more less ahead on the agenda bob zoellick talked about last night, plus some analysts and things. let winnow -- let me now turn to

the period of 2001 until 2002. my work on this is really a sketch of the period because there is a lot that i don't understand to my satisfaction. briefly the pre-9/11 period i judge it in which the foreign- policy is as inchoate as the clinton years. a lot of people read in the entrails with hindsight and see a secret master plan for the bush administration is being evident before 9/11 and i don't think that is true. without the benefit of hindsight, i could read the entrails to come up with any number of plausible scenarios of what the administration was likely to do, and i just don't think it is fair. then however you come into the period from 9/11 until about the spring of 2002. i believe the 9/11 events really are a great shock. i can't convey in my paper or in this talk what a shock the 9/11

events are and what affect that had on the people will experience them and their sense of responsibility. i don't have the novelist's gift to recreate the atmosphere. you actually have to have visited the 9/11 site while it was still smoking and smelling and remember the overwhelming sense -- sensory impression, to have the experience meeting would anguished families and widows and would awards and the orphans and then to have the sense of personal responsibility punctuated by middle of the night alarms working of a deep sleep telling you you might need to hide it relatives because you had a report they were under threat, or another alarm in which leading people and the administration were told they had been exposed to a deadly poison for which there was no antidote and they may die sometime soon. until it turned out some hours later it was a false alarm. example after example of this. it is a serious matter.

i take john moeller's point, the instinct to elevate this into a great huge world of course, that is al qaeda as the new marxist leninist that as of this age, i think is deeply boss. and it gratifies bin laden's what is the wildest fantasies. but they tell you in charlottesville a crazy man is running around with live rice and getting ready to pour it into the reservoir, you would not think he is a world historical force but boy what this community doing stuff. we would be reacting massively to that crazy man. so it is a very big issue. a huge agenda comes out of this that i think i've developed critically in the winter of 2001-2002, which is four parts. it will series of things to try to invent an improvised to improve the way we can go after al qaeda and its affiliates. this is a very complicated story spanning a number of different

agencies. some of which the story is still veiled. second, a huge effort to change american domestic preparedness culminated in the development of the part of homeland security. even before dhs is decided on, march of 2002, and secretly planned in the next three months, the administration have decided to double spending on domestic prepared as adding an additional $18 billion. you can imagine all the program development that goes on that scale. third, a huge effort to appeal globally to the world and show them that we stand for a different kind of model of global development, punctuated by the whole millennium challenge approach. not only does that put billions of dollars that will ultimately be the largest rise in u.s. development assistance in the last 50 + years, but also intellectually transforms not only the u.s. but also worldwide attitudes about how to think about developments into what i

called compact model. it has a very powerful impact. fourth, the decision that we are going to take a long, festering issue of iraq and we will have to come to grips with it and settle it one way or another during 2002. i don't think this is a decision for war, but it implies you have to be ready for war. the iraq issue, as a point out in my paper, had a long history that even though many people who write about it don't know that history, everybody in the government working on this issue new that history so historians who want to understand why they made the decisions they made at understand history that was in their heads. they basically looked at the iraq issue right away in 2001, they ran to the same stalemate that bedeviled the clinton administration for years and basically did nothing conclusive about it for a year and then after 9/11 decided they could no longer tolerate the risk of going much further. i think the key atmosphere in

the winter of 2001 and 2002 -- after 9/11, how much risk are you prepared to tolerate? 10%, 15%? what is the lesson of you from 9/11 on how well you tell right risk and what you are willing to do before the risk materializes to head it off? two, a belief in the capacity of our government to address this because of the startling and positive surprising success of afghanistan. and since that decisive action was decisively rewarded, decisive action is being required by the times in a situation we can no longer tolerate as much risk, let us put this on the agenda. i will stop there partly because there is a whole series of decisions made beginning about june of 2002 and about exactly how do you get the iraq solution that you want that are actually very complicated and in which i still have not fully --

my own satisfaction. suffice it to say that agenda is set but how to attain that agenda is not set. i believe and are given the paper that any likely u.s. government that had been in power after 9/11, including specifically al gore, would have more or less made somehow settling the iraq issue a key part of the american agenda in 2002 and would probably aspired at a minimum to something very like it u.n. security council 1441 approach. how that then would have worked out beyond that is harder for me to read. i will stop there. >> thanks very much, philip. those were three really interesting presentations that put a lot on the table. there are a lot of specific things to go after. and i hope you all will in just a minute when i open it up for questions. but let me just put one question to the three panelists that is

somewhat at a broader level. if it is this. in each of the administration's you worked, bush 41, clinton administration, and the bush 43 administration, at least up until 9/11, the united states had a difficult time coming off what philip zeilikow -- cause a new master script. it seems to me if you look in the aftermath, the collapse of the wall, and the attacks of 9/11, the government did a pretty decent job in the kind of tactical response and clean up to the immediate aftermath in both situations in terms of unification in germany -- and germany was in nato -- and after 9/11 in terms of the invasion of afghanistan. when things started to -- where things started to get shaky was in the longer term plan.

in terms of the bush administration 43 did have a doctrine and while after 9/11, by the fall of 2002, that seemed to guide things and seen to be problematic. what did -- discussed want strategy the clinton administration did have that was kind of long-term lead to poor results. eric edelman made the case that dpg was a success, guided the administration. perhaps part of that focus lighted as to the rise of radical islam and terrorism. the question is, maybe these doctrines and long term planning things aren't that great. you agree with that?

>> i have some sympathy with grand strategy. if you look at the list of nine points, they are not bad platitudes but they are platitudes. be adaptable, be flexible, take account of conflicting interests, and so on. those are good guidance for living and deciding but not a strategy. i believe strategies and all the choices. my classic example of a real strategic decision was roosevelt's decision in 1941 and in 1942 to first establish and then stick to it that germany first approach to winning the war. i think it is interesting, what ever else went wrong with the --

it was not from lack of the strategy. there was a clear decision it was important, a clear decision on how to do it, which was to back yeltsin both materially and politically and emotionally. there was a good deal of money and lots of presidential time put into the effort. and i think part of the problem is that grand strategy is first of all, there is a real loss the -- reluctance to make real strategic decisions because they do involves choices and they commit you in the future and they involve taking things away from one day and given them to another. i confess i don't understand business school models, but with great respect, to expand our market share from 35% to 45% is not a strategy. it is a hope or aspiration or something like that, but that

kind of stuff often passes for strategy. it is certainly important to let a clear sense of where you are going. it is also in poor and live a clear sense of what you can do if you want to give priority to something. premier riding of lots and lots of words, which, if you read them, which i have from time to time been compelled to do, is painful. they are full of platitudes that are almost irrefutable. it is hard to imagine the contrary. and, you know, values are important but interests are important, too. personal relationships are important but basic national goals will define -- we will probably get a brilliantly perfect one from the new administration. [laughter] >> i agree with a bit of what what said but i differ in one

respect. i have been and any number of interagency meetings, and i have been an all three of these administrations, when the temptation is given any problem, for people to sit down and say, what we going to do, what is the list of action items will have and what should the talking points before the demarche before anyone is ask the question, what is it trying to accomplish and what we want to achieve? in that regard, i think strategy and strategy documents can be important because they frame of discussion and help frame the choices. i agree that lists of nine priorities -- one secretary of defense said if you have nine priorities, you have no priorities. you do have to make choices. i also agree in some sense that the simplest strategies are the best. europe first. containment. if you consider that a bumper sticker, probably a good

strategy. you will pursue lee's army in northern virginia -- even if it takes all summer. pretty good strategy. and not relevant for this area. well, some strategists it longer to execute than others. the point is i think in our system in particular -- and i think it has gotten harder and harder and harder over the years since the end of the second world war because the bureaucracies have become bigger, there are more of them, there are more players at the table, and therefore translating a president's intent for the commander in chief's intent, in strategic terms, into actual policies become harder and harder. i certainly agree -- and i think phillip and bob zoellick said this as well -- anything that is run through the interagency bound not to come out as a strategy but stapling together of different wish

lists. but i think there is some utility in having reduced in some place and very short statement of what it is they are trying to accomplish as a demonstration, what should our objectives date, what are the priorities and how should we try to go about making those choices? >> i actually come in with a great degree of skepticism about the strategy document, having been involved in crafting one or two. and then recommend to anyone interested, a very nice article -- article written and national security some time ago. and sometimes useful to write communicative documents about the construct. we discussed it with bob last night. a good test for such a document is, after you have read the document, did you learn

something you didn't know before you read it? the position is understood with greater precision, the authority behind a position is clarified. if the answer is, no, then it really was a boring and painful and wasted experience as what has pointed out. one advantage of the national security strategy in 2002 in comparison to the state draft we had was it was much shorter -- shorter, so less painful and that sense. i want to focus attention on the search for a master script. i want to focus your attention on two key words -- one is a pair of words. the first is the words full defense. usually master script arise with deep beliefs in people's heads that are widely understood. the term forward in fence is a concept deeply encoded in the world of national security policy makers for whole

generations -- forward defense. what is happening, i think, the reflexes of forward defense, what does it mean when the enemy is in the wilderness areas of the world? does it mean we have to defend against the enemy in afghanistan, because that is where the full the gap is now? i think reflecting a little bit on how the instinct and reflex of forward defense has been transmitted through the environment of new threats, pay some dividends for you. the other word is the term preemption. it actually has an interesting history in the nss, which just invited me to elaborate further. in the drafting of the national security strategy of 2002, the first draft appeared in march of 2002 did not use the word preemption.

i discussed it with rice and hadley and we agreed it would be right and helpful to use the word preempt and prevention and the context of preventing terrorist attacks. i slid the draft did go on to explain there was a difference between prevention -- there was an enemy with open hostilities and you want to spoil the next attack. the draft exclusively used preemption and the context of the counterterrorism section of the document. all the wmd stuff used the word prevent. to prevent hostile states from using or acquiring -- acquiring or using wmd against us and there are a whole kind of ways to prevent that. that was the dichotomy in all subsequent drafts that rice and hadley and others reviewed again and again, until the july of 2002, at which point they decided to pretty much moved -- leave it in little bit in the terrorism section, but move it

in the wmd section in mid july. the main reason why pre-emption was moved into the debby and the section, the best i could gather, is because bill lawyers when it there -- moved into the wmd section. condi rice's legal advisor made the argument that will help us use the term ephriam gin and the concept of self-defense against possible wmd adversaries because that is a recognized term under international law. frankly, it bollinger hadn't it logical agenda, it was to raise the political and evidentiary bars and not lower it. condi rights in her perspective thought of a semantics were immaterial because they were all just different instruments of prevention and she actually had a lengthy interview with david sanger in june of 2002, gun ban on background but which is available now, in which she at some length explain exactly what our view is of the matter and

the background of the significance of the president's west point speech. and other words, the adoption of the term preemption in that context, which they could explain later in october, -- the question of what we are going to do about iraq and exactly how do we get the problem solved is becoming crystalline and the summer of 2002. but more than that, i think it is hard to bear. the thing it clearly -- the inference of that sum brand new policy of prevention of wmd was embedded in that original conception of the document even after it had been discussed and reviewed rice and hadley multiple times. >> i would like to open it up. we will start with admiral -- and then headed back to ambassador wolfowitz. down in front first, please?

please use the microphone, which allows us to communicate with the world wide audience. >> i have an observation and a question, too. i learned that in academic circles you can make a statement and then say, am i right, and turn it into a question. i, at this from the vantage point of a practitioner who is trying to carry out the policies and carry out the strategy of our country and explain this down to level of a marine caring a rifle, how do you do this, and explaining the arcane parts of developing a strategy are sometimes challenging. i would argue that the point, eric, you made of having a mission, a europe first or something like that, that is written down, is very useful.

sometimes the development of a strategy or the strategic plan or the planning documents that we talked about, the maine utility of them is not necessarily in the outcome because as it has been pointed out, once the first bullet flies, things change anyway. but the drill of having gone through the thought process of trying to pull all this together then makes you, forces you to have considered at least many of the options that will arise and then you can respond more quickly. i think that is that more important part of the utility of strategic documents and the planning process as well. so, i think instead of saying this is all just a washington journal necessarily, it is not that, -- washington drill necessarily.

the importance of preemption and prevention is really important as you go down stream, so that people who are trying to execute and carry this out and do the nation's bidding can figure that out and have something to referred to. and so, the documents of putting these together are not just bureaucratic boiler plate. they are good things to have. keeping in mind, though, one of my favorite books is "fold by randomness" and stuff happens and very seldom do they go the way you plan. am i right? thank you. [laughter] >> in the back, please. >> i agree everything at the adel just said -- >> can you press it and identify yourself? >> you might just as why don't i just sit down and shut up.

to elaborate. i think there is a difference between strategic thinking and strategic document. and maybe if further difference between strategy and brand strategy. i think it starts with the question of asking what you are doing. eric made that comment. in simple terms, described that we were sitting in london for an hour and have discussed norplant trip to the middle east and 90 minutes before discussing the logistics questions, going through the talking points, most important, who would be in which meeting. that is a very more detail. finally someone asked, what is the purpose of this trip? it is so easy to get lost in the details especially when you are dealing with something as fascinated and -- fascinating and complicated and deeply passionate as the defense budget. you can argue for weeks and weeks before you get to the question, what is the damn thing for? that is only the first step.

and i do think if you think of it in its totality, it is about how to get to the objectives that may not be objectively achievable. in fact, the germany for strategy was not the service strategy to defeat germany but a strategy for winning the war. macarthur had an island hopping strategy. someone once said that anyone who thinks that the shortest district -- distance between two points is a straight line should be disqualified from working on the middle east. i think they should be disqualified from working on strategy because in direction is a big part of it. making decisions about allocating resources. when you think about commanders in battle, that is what they are doing all the time. the third thing is, usually implying that someone is out there trying to defeat you. business competitor for opposing commander or maybe just the world in general, if you are not just sailing on a straight line.

having said all of that, if you are really thinking about the totality of strategy, it is never going to be written down in the document. it is going to be the product of a thought process. sometimes an individual, sometimes a big group, going through some different branches that they know what to do much to go to the next one and probably don't want to write it down for a number of reasons -- including the fact of depressing because some day it may be wrong. but when you talk about grand strategy, i think some of these, if you like, bumper stickers -- containment was a word that the find an objective, implied some choices, it implied but only implied -- one of the big issues never resolved was contained in forever or containment as a way of leading to the collapse of the soviet union. i guess not everybody says it is the latter. but it had a lot of meaning in

the one word. and in a slightly more tactical sense -- unification was the objective. a lot flows from defining these objectives. these documents that i know -- not only had to read but right, i don't think they do too much but i do think that without making too big of case for it, i think in a regional defense strategy we did try to imply some choices. if you read it carefully or between lines or take out some of the rigidity there are choices implied there and important sense of direction that i think are too often, we do get the government side up and we will have the grand document of the quadrennial -- and we will make it do it every four years and when we do it we will watch everyday's progress to make sure they don't do anything don't like, forget it. >> let us take two more questions -- down there in

front, please? >> thank you very much. i am kate center from politics department, graduate student. imagine in these transplanted and looked moments, but the key to strategic planning to readiness is identifying allies and rivals, identifying the state's likely to support you in those interest and those likely to try to undermine your ability to achieve those interest. i am curious and those moments, what criteria are used to distinguish allies from adverse fire -- adversaries given a change in the international context, how much attention to devise new criteria to distinguish allies from rivals, and i am interested in feedback from or wishes to comment. >> one more question with john here.

>> john mueller. if you are doing strategic reviews, including examination of fundamental premises, the idea is it tends to be that much more practical. for example, proliferation is a bad thing, been around a long time, there hysterically of course one china got the bomb in 1964 and john mccombs saying if it happens it would be world war three. huge constant exaggerations about how fast proliferation what happened. and those countries recognizing it as a waste of time, effort and money and those to give them up have not suffered any ill effects. an assumption that proliferation -- stop the implication -- stopping proliferation of

nuclear weapons as a supreme party but never gets examined. shelton these promises, the important promises of policy -- shouldn't these promiemises examined from time to time? >> i want to give you all just a brief chance to answer these. >> the latter about nuclear proliferation is just not true. the united states has never taken the position that every acquisition of nuclear-weapons by another country is all equally bad. the short answer of why we have a double standard with respect to iran and north korea relative to israel was the same we have a double standard with respect to france and england. the nature of the regime makes a difference. if sweden got nuclear weapons, you might speak to the question of whether it would annoy the

norwegians but probably would not be a huge threat to us. whereas if north korea or iran had nuclear-weapons, it is a serious issue. of this strategy issue, first of all, that moral or probably other people in the room could identify the classic parts of a military plan. but one is to identify the mission, which is not actually a strategy. it is, what are we trying to do? whether it is to take the hill. that is different from the threat which is, who should try to stop us from taking the hill. and it is quite different from both the strategy which, to my mind, is the broad approach of how are we going to go about doing -- which lever are we going to pull. and then the tactics. in some cases, these are issues of the fact.

a very interesting question. it is sufficiently easy to tell who will help or want. i like to relate it intelligence -- to the nobility of the fact. i used to be amused by the fact when i did charts in the assault ii agreement we had to show what the forces would be like. for the soviet union we had one answer. for the united states, with a three, because the air force and navy could not agree so we have the air force of view, the navy view, an average of the two, meaning our pretense is with the soviet answer better than winning the american was kind of strange. my favorite example which most of you sensibly forgotten, hope you all have forgotten -- some of you may also have forgotten the long-range cruise missiles and pershing ii's in europe. we know because the germans said

the requirement that there had to date -- germany would take some but i had to be another european country that would take some, and england didn't count. england was not european enough. what we really -- did realize was the italians were easy. the italian communist party was in favor of doing it. we did not know that. that is an intelligence problem basically of a whole might have an interest in what you were wanting to do, or who might have an interest in stopping it. to be fair to my original answer, my disdain for big stories, the question was, was a problem that we did not have a new master script for each administration? there -- that is very different than saying, given a specific problem you have a properly organized plan, including

mission, strategy, resources. >> i don't think the nss document, national security strategy, was a strategy. when i was asked to draft it i changed the title enter of national security strategy and substitute a basic statement of national security policy, which is a title i credit from an eisenhower era document that and much admired. that actually stayed in the title i don't know for the next eight drafts or some did, did not change until really very near the end when probably some lawyers -- well, the statute said we must submit a national security strategy. all right, just call it a national security strategy then. when it was being drafted, nobody thought it was really a strategy. told you how to relate means and ends at make choices doing that.

indeed, the origin of the strategy is before 9/11, cond i, and maybe the president, sent to the administration did not have a clear statement of what its foreign policy was, it did seem rather inchoate, and also changing her views from the campaign that she had articulated for the campaign, decided to come to a number ideas about how to respond to globalization and how the united states could play a role responding to a lot of conditions associated with globalization and an important statement of policy. initialed ruminations that then would be built on later, which she supervised a process that created that in july of 2001, were really all about that. indeed, that material did adapted to the post 9/11 world because uc 9/11 in a way dramatically underscored a particularly viral form of global forces and we need to

have a much broader statement of national security policy that was not just about terrorism but was about all these other things, too. indeed, one of the great tragedies of the administration is a sum much of what they were trying to articulate in this broader agenda was then swamped by what happened to them in iraq in 2003 and the following years. the distinguished allies from adversaries, very important to figure out -- easily you know what -- who your adversaries are. deciding who your allies are can be trickier. often once you figure out what you ought to do, if you do the right analysis you will figure out who is helping you. that is at least a starting point. aside from them, the other thing is what are the established institutions we already have that already provide us with our default allies? that was something zoellick was talking about last night. a final point about re-examining

premises. usually people cannot reexamine their premises until they run into a wall of some kind, they did a dope/. we have been wrong about something. usually they don't believe they are wrong about the threat or problem, which is where your folks -- concerned about exaggerated threats. but one of the ways that might prompt you to reexamine threats is when your policy option to deal with the threat no longer seems viable. i think that these things are appreciations that are a complex interaction judgment, values, and sturman of judgment, -- instrumental judgment. a concrete example -- let's suppose you think that the bush administration may have exaggerated the threat posed by iraqi wmd's in 2002.

and this is an interesting historian argument. clearly, though, they were not going to reexamine the promises about the intelligence unless they had instrumental needs to do so, are rising in a big way of all 2002. they had to make their case to congress and the united nations. also, let's suppose as the war plan was developed, that the secretary of defense was telling them, boy, but is this hard. you thought this is a 225-day war, this will actually take years and will require at least the full deployment of the 265,000 people in a hybrid plan and maybe more. you get a briefing like that that impresses you with all of the things you are running into, that will add to get you to reexamine a few of the premises at the same time. >> briefly on the few points that have been raised. i agree with what admiral and paul wolfowitz said about strategy. i would make one addition, you

have commanders intend because you know out in a fog of war units will get lost, ships separated, aircraft will find the are not what they are supposed to be and you want people when they improvise to understand what they are trying to emprise toward and i think it goes a little bit to philip's rather interesting breakout of the different phases of which 41 and where they were prepared, as he puts it, and provides properly or to adapt flexibly given the challenges in those periods later on maybe they were not able to do that. on the question of allies, i guess the only thing i would add to what phillips said is in this particular period, the end of the cold war that we are focusing on, offered up a kind of interesting case study in that you had your traditional alliances. what you say gec and dpg, strengthening those and keeping your allies tied to us but you also have a whole range of

potential new allies, including, in some people's mind, potentially it democratizing russia. i think that is one of the points of what deposit paper, the clinton administration focusing its policy on rusher at reform but the hopes that russia and some sense could be an ally. by the way i think that has been underpinning of four successive presidential and ministrations -- 41, clinton, 43, and now the obama administration. the only question is whether the obama administration to make it work with the kind of russia walked described coming out of the process. i make this as an observation. i agree with what what said about regime tied making a difference. i observed, having originally having my start in life in the academy and then in the government, spent 30 years in government, that i notice there is a body of literature that says, more nuclear weapons are better. after all, if we have been

stable bipolar nuclear during the cold war, what is wrong with having more? and i think steve rose and had an article back in the mid-1970s saying no, the way to have a stable middle east balance is for everyone to have nuclear- weapons in the middle east. interestingly, and what, you may dissent from this, i have never met anybody, a practitioner in an interagency meeting who believes that. annexing me that goes to your point about the assumption not being challenged. but i think it has to do with the fact that for the people will bear the responsibility and worry about the fear of the use of nuclear weapons someplace and sometimes, no one has solved what bernard brodie and others defined in the late 1950's as the end country problem. bipolar nuclear balance the work, by the way, given what we found opening the soviet archives i would not be very

sanguine. i think we became damn close as coming suggested, and the cuban missile crisis, with all due respect. an episode in 1980 through the russians thought we were close to a nuclear exchange. i'm not sure how well we understood the terence working in a bilateral context. when you start having lots of countries with a very small stockpiles of nuclear weapons, and you start to get more players in the game, i think it is pretty reasonable to assume you will have more people looking at the potential of preemption and i think you could get much greater bias in favor of using these things. you say correctly that in the early 1960's, people thought we would have for the nuclear powers, and 20 of 30 years later in 9.

that has been -- to keep it at 9. i am not personally comfortable with a nine. >> it is all very well to examine premises, and he certainly should and you pick a terrible example but there are others that are important examining. i think there is also this question of what is the alternative. we are probably -- we will have to make a decision on what do we do if we cannot either by sanctions or persuasion or military force eliminate iran's nuclear potential. there will be people who will argue, not hopelessly steeply, that we should live with it. it is not that it is an absolute -- i am not in favor of that resulted but i think that issue will come up. there are much better examples of unexamined premise seas like

the nature of latin american governments. >> in the front? >> held up, politics department graduate student. -- hilda. this is a question for all three of you. brent scowcroft once said for him the cold war ended when gorbachev allowed for german real vacation within nato. however, i think some people argue that gorbachev allowed for this because he did not think nato would enlarge to the east and acting someone earlier said, or zoellick said yesterday that bush was opposed to this source said he was. -- opposed to this, or said he was. in the clinton administration it did. to what extent was this development a broken promise on the part of the u.s. and to what extent it defines the current relationship as some people see

as very filled with tension. >> another one, john? right here. >> gaf, -- jeff. i'm don, a product of the government and academia and more recently, a journalism. i have the same feeling, jeff, i did when you had your conference here a couple years ago on strategy after of the bush administration dared it runs something like this. you've got three brilliance dollars. today who have been in government who are -- brilliant scholars today who have been in government will understand what it is about. what i have heard is america is going to go on continuing to be

the preeminent world power, perhaps challenged, but we are going to keep on doing pretty much the way we have done it. do you suppose that barack obama in these five sessions he has had with his nsc and the last few weeks on the future policy in afghanistan, has brought in anybody who asks the question, what is it going to cost? is this country willing to pay those costs to maintain this kind of international policy into the foreseeable future? >> one more question down in front. >> hi, i'm kyle, a graduate student. my question is similar in some ways to the last two and it's back to the theme of the last panel which is strategic lessons

learned. i was intrigued by professor zoellick's comments that after 9/11 and the lesson learned was decisive action was decisively rewarded and if the for that emerges, deal with it now, chop off its head now, take care of it now before it gets any worse. while you didn't explicitly say what a lesson was of 1989, my sense of your commentary on it was that it was almost an opposite lesson. you don't always -- don't always act before you know if the events that are transpiring organically might not be desirable. so lesson there, as he put it, it was more european issue rate -- history that american history and a certain amount of strategic restraint was actually a desirable